"Terminator" and "Fuel": Making the best of the end of the world

Our pending apocalypse is all the rage. The question is: Which is your own personal favorite apocalypse? Because every groupthink favors its own final countdown.

Terrorists will kill us (say conservatives). Global warming will kill us (say liberals). North Korea will kill us (say South Koreans). Fluoride will kill us (says my lady love, an ex-Green Peace-er).

Wait, we can't even brush our teeth without perishing? Yuck.

In video games, the apocalypse has served as the storyline framework for probably several hundred games in the past 20 years, from Doom to Resident Evil and on and on.

Now here we are with the latest end-of-the-world game, Terminator: Salvation, based on the movie. The film's lead actor, Christian Bale, refused to lend this game his likeness and voice, due to money or pride. What a nice life he must have, with his high-class problems.

Terminator: Salvation finds hero John Conner living in a post-apocalyptic Earth, battling robot armies that launched nuclear weapons against humans, as they flex steely determination to root out remaining homo sapiens. Now that's a high-class problem.

Bale was lucky to have baled on Salvation. Sure, it looks okay (not great), you can move your character around fairly intuitively (but not great), and you can blast robots with shotguns and rocket launchers (reliable weaponry).

But the game is a pretty simple and redundant arcade-style shooter. You jog past rusty cars, discarded mannequins and house rubble, and it is your charge to cream robots by, for instance, shooting them in the face to stun them, then running behind them to shoot their vulnerable backsides.

Ugh: Salvation's killing routines become routine quickly. There is little replay value and no online multiplayer.

So let's move onto another apocalypse, shall we? Let's play the racing game Fuel, in which global warming has left only you and a few other survivors alive, with a fleet of 70 superior motorcycles, cars, trucks and ATVs.

The gist: You race each other over 100,000 miles of wooded and sandy roads across 5,000 square miles because when the apocalypse comes, you will want to drive your butt off.

In short, Fuel is mostly what you want from a racing game - to speed across splendid and varied terrains fraught with peril. Online, you can race against 15 human gamers. You can also choose not to compete, but to drive leisurely around hills and lakes, getting big air under jumps. Downsides: No turbo boosting, and the game starts too easy.

So in the battle of apocalypses this week, global warming is the fun winner. I'm not sure what Robert Frost would think. Pondering the eventual apocalypse, the poet guessed fire would come from desire, though ice would suffice. Robert Frost never mentioned fluoride, or driving in singed forests on ATVs. Obviously, he didn't know what the hell he was talking about.